The duckweeds are the sole members of the monocotyledonous family Lemnaceae. The five genera and 38 species are all small, free-floating, fresh-water plants whose geographical range spans the entire globe (Landolt (1986) Biosystematic Investigation on the Family of Duckweeds: The Family of Lemnaceae—A Monograph Study Geobatanischen Institut ETH, Stiftung Rubel, Zurich). Although the most morphologically reduced plants known, most duckweed species have all the tissues and organs of much larger plants, including roots, stems, flowers, seeds and fronds. Duckweed species have been studied extensively and a substantial literature exists detailing their ecology, systematics, life-cycle, metabolism, disease and pest susceptibility, their reproductive biology, genetic structure, and cell biology. (Hillman (1961) Bot. Review 27: 221; Landolt (1986) Biosystematic Investigation on the Family of Duckweeds: The Family of Lemnaceae—A Monograph Study Geobatanischen Institut ETH, Stiftung Rubel, Zurich).
The growth habit of the duckweeds is ideal for microbial culturing methods. The plant rapidly proliferates through vegetative budding of new fronds, in a macroscopic manner analogous to asexual propagation in yeast. This proliferation occurs by vegetative budding from meristematic cells. The meristematic region is small and is found on the ventral surface of the frond. Meristematic cells lie in two pockets, one on each side of the frond midvein. The small midvein region is also the site from which the root originates and the stem arises that connects each frond to its mother frond. The meristematic pocket is protected by a tissue flap. Fronds bud alternately from these pockets. Doubling times vary by species and are as short as 20-24 hours (Landolt (1957) Ber. Schweiz. Bot. Ges. 67: 271; Chang et al. (1977) Bull. Inst. Chem. Acad. Sin. 24:19; Datko and Mudd (1970) Plant Physiol. 65:16; Venkataraman et al. (1970) Z. Pflanzenphysiol. 62: 316).
Intensive culture of duckweed results in the highest rates of biomass accumulation per unit time (Landolt and Kandeler (1987) The Family of Lemnaceae—A Monographic Study Vol. 2: Phytochemistry, Physiology, Application, Bibliography, Veroffentlichungen des Geobotanischen Institutes ETH, Stiftung Rubel, Zurich), with dry weight accumulation ranging from 6-15% of fresh weight (Tillberg et al. (1979) Physiol. Plant. 46:5; Landolt (1957) Ber. Schweiz. Bot. Ges. 67:271; Stomp, unpublished data). Protein content of a number of duckweed species grown under varying conditions has been reported to range from 15-45% dry weight (Chang et al (1977) Bull. Inst. Chem. Acad. Sin. 24:19; Chang and Chui (1978) Z. Pflanzenphysiol. 89:91; Porath et al. (1979) Aquatic Botany 7:272; Appenroth et al. (1982) Biochem. Physiol. Pflanz. 177:251). Using these values, the level of protein production per liter of medium in duckweed is on the same order of magnitude as yeast gene expression systems.
Duckweed plant or duckweed nodule cultures can be efficiently transformed with an expression cassette containing a nucleotide sequence of interest by any one of a number of methods including Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer, ballistic bombardment, or electroporation. Stable duckweed transformants can be isolated by transforming the duckweed cells with both the nucleotide sequence of interest and a gene that confers resistance to a selection agent, followed by culturing the transformed cells in a medium containing the selection agent. See U.S. Pat. No. 6,040,498 to Stomp et al.
A duckweed gene expression system provides the pivotal technology that would be useful for a number of research and commercial applications. For plant molecular biology research as a whole, a differentiated plant system that can be manipulated with the laboratory convenience of yeast provides a very fast system in which to analyze the developmental and physiological roles of isolated genes. For commercial production of valuable polypeptides, a duckweed-based system has a number of advantages over existing microbial or cell culture systems. Plants demonstrate post-translational processing that is similar to mammalian cells, overcoming one major problem associated with the microbial cell production of biologically active mammalian polypeptides, and it has been shown by others (Hiatt (1990) Nature 334:469) that plant systems have the ability to assemble multi-subunit proteins, an ability often lacking in microbial systems. Scale-up of duckweed biomass to levels necessary for commercial production of recombinant proteins is faster and more cost efficient than similar scale-up of mammalian cells, and unlike other suggested plant production systems, e.g., soybeans and tobacco, duckweed can be grown in fully contained and controlled biomass production vessels, making the system's integration into existing protein production industrial infrastructure far easier.
Accordingly, there remains a need for optimized methods and compositions for expressing proteins of interest in duckweed.